Now that Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard's been out almost three months, several apps, tweaks, and plug-ins have emerged that can customize (and sometimes re-Tigerize) your Mac. Now that you're comfortable with Leopard's new features, like Stacks, Quick Look, Time Machine, and Spaces, it's time to roll up your sleeves and make your Mac look, feel, and behave just how you like. Personalize Leopard's great new features, revert the annoying ones, or just get a taste of the things you didn't know your Mac could do with our favorite Leopard tweaks.

The Desktop and Dock

Whether you love or hate Leopard's most-touted feature—the Dock and Desktop's new look and feel—you can enhance or revert Leopard's changes with a little know-how.

Make the menubar opaque. Lots of Leopard users say the menubar's new transparency makes menu items difficult to read. To turn the menubar opaque again (like it was in Tiger), download and run the free OpaqueMenuBar (original post). If you don't want to run a whole new piece of software just for this tweak, several LH readers suggest editing your Desktop background image to include a white section across the top for behind the transparent menubar.

Kill the Dock reflection. Personally I think it's cool, but it does draw my eye away from whatever I'm doing when dragging windows. If the Dock's new reflective qualities are too distracting to you, turn it off using two Terminal commands (via Wired, omit the $ prompt when you type them yourself):

Stacks

One of my favorite Leopard features, Stacks, adds fly-out menus of folders to your Dock. Here are a few ways to trick out your Stacks:

Identify your Stacks with drawer overlay icons. One of the best things I've done to my Stacks is add attractive, drawer overlay icons to them, which add much-needed easy visual identification. Here's where and how to set up the drawer overlap icons.

Add a Recent Items Stack. If you're constantly reaching for the same documents and applications, add a custom Stack of recent applications to your Dock. In the Terminal, enter the following commands:

Navigate hierarchical folders from the Dock like in Tiger. If you miss the ability to navigate down into folder contents from the Dock, install freeware HeirarchicalDock (original post) to get folder browsing back.

Quick Look

Another Lifehacker favorite Leopard feature, Quick Look displays the contents of a file directly from Finder with the tap of a Spacebar—no application launching required. At first blush Quick Look seems most useful for viewing photos (especially giant folders stuffed with ambiguously named ones like IMG_8097.jpg from the digital camera). But you can also Quick Look office documents, iCal events, and fonts. A couple of plug-ins can supercharge Quick Look's preview capabilities, too:

Time Machine

Leopard's dead-simple backup utility, Time Machine, probably has more people backing up their Mac than ever before precisely because there are so few configuration options. But if you're determined to stretch Time Machine beyond its default behavior, there are two ways to do so:

Customize Time Machine's backup schedule with TimeMachineScheduler. If Time Machine's hourly hard drive spin-up is slowing down your Mac or just seems too frequent to you, customize the schedule using freeware TimeMachineScheduler (original post). TimeMachineScheduler's interval slider lets you set Time Machine's default backup time from 1 hour to up to 12 hours apart.

Enable Airport disk destinations with iTimeMachine. New freeware iTimeMachine (original post) lets you set network disks as Time Machine's backup destination—great if you've got other Macs in the house but no FireWire drive. Warning: We haven't tested iTimeMachine's support for network disks, which Apple marks as "unsupported"—so do proceed with caution when it comes to critical data using this software.

More OS X Tweaks

Finally, a lightning round of OS X customizations (some for Leopard, some not Leopard-specific):

Gina Trapani, the editor of Lifehacker, resists the urge to use the word "roar" in regards to Leopard. Her weekly feature, Geek to Live, appears every Monday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Geek to Live feed to get new installments in your newsreader.